


Assets

by downtownfishies



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV), Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon-Typical Violence, Friendship, Gen, Trust Issues
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-03-29
Updated: 2019-12-20
Packaged: 2019-12-26 01:49:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 4,226
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18273338
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/downtownfishies/pseuds/downtownfishies
Summary: Scientist-turned-spy Jemma Simmons has infiltrated HYDRA.  Her mission: to gather information on their scientific projects and report back to SHIELD.  But SHIELD isn’t SHIELD anymore, and Jemma’s undercover work sets her in the path of people who need her help just as much as-- if not more than-- her old team.  It all starts when a mission gone wrong leaves Jemma at the mercy of a dangerous fugitive…AU from Agents of SHIELD 2x03 “Making Friends and Influencing People”.





	1. Extraction

**Author's Note:**

> I decided to throw Bucky at Agents of SHIELD season 2. What could possibly go wrong?

It all would have been fine if he had spotted the sniper.

That was supposed to be what he did. Targets and recon and threat assessment and knowing when there was a sniper on the upper deck. But his instincts had been less than reliable since the last mission. He'd done his research and laid out his plan but there was not supposed to be a sniper.

Yet there was, and he heard the shot, and then the target was in the water. Had it been a kill shot? Was there anything to be salvaged of this?

_Why didn't it occur to you that someone else might have their eyes on this target?_

There wasn't supposed to be a sniper.

The kid was in the water. No, the target. The target was in the water.

_So what are you gonna do about it?_

He set off the pulse, and everyone on the main deck went down. At least something on this goddamn op worked like it was supposed to. If anyone was still on the deck above, they wouldn't have been taken out, but no shots came. The ship was silent, and he stepped among the bodies of unconscious HYDRA agents to get to the railing. Armed muscle, a head of operations set apart by his tailored suit. And collapsed by the rail, just where the target had gone over the side, lay the biologist. She might be useful, especially if the kid-- if the target was hurt.

He grabbed her and dove into the water.

 

Jemma woke with a fuzziness in her head she had learned to associate with dendrotoxin. She missed not knowing that feeling. Hadn't it been easier back then?

Less exciting, though.

She was on a bed. The room was unfamiliar, but it struck her as hotel-like. The cheap kind, with a scratchy coverlet on the bed and an ugly painting hanging crooked on the wall. It was warm, the same kind of warm as the harbor had been, and though the window was cracked it did little for the climate inside. Her hair and her clothes were damp.

At last she had to let her brain acknowledge the things in the room she'd been avoiding. Donnie Gill bleeding on the floor. And a man watching her from the chair in the corner, sharpening a knife.

"Can you fix him?"

His gaze was intense, a fire behind an unkempt mess of dark hair.

Okay, she thought, cool. I'm definitely going to die.

"Can you. Fix him." He didn't sound angry, exactly, just... dangerous.

She forced herself to look back down at Donnie Gill. Focusing on him, she liked even less what she saw. The sniper's bullet had struck him in the right shoulder, and the blood had soaked through his shirt on that side. His other arm, along with much of his face, hair, and clothing, were covered with frost. The hot air from outside warred with the icy chill blowing off his body. He was losing control of his power. He was almost certainly dying.

"How long has it been since he was shot?" Jemma remembered hearing the gunshot and seeing Donnie go overboard, but beyond that, she didn't know.

"About an hour."

"I'm not sure anyone could fix this," she said carefully. "And I'm not a surgeon."

In that moment it wasn't Donnie Gill but Skye lying there, bleeding out in a dark room, and Jemma was powerless to stop it. She knew she was panicking. She needed to stop. She couldn't lose her head in front of this man. What would Skye do? Skye would keep her cool. Jemma tried to keep her breathing level.

"I can get the bullet out myself, but I can't touch him. You're a biochemist. You've been studying him in your HYDRA lab for weeks preparing for this assignment. You know better than anyone in the world what's going on inside him. Tell me what you need to fix him."

So he knew who she was, at least somewhat. It didn't seem helpful to point out that she hadn't even known what she was studying until yesterday. She still didn't know much about this man, aside from the fact that he had at least one knife, access to Icer technology, and he definitely wasn't HYDRA. Setting aside for a moment that he had kidnapped one of their agents and a valuable asset, she heard venom around the name as he spoke it. Here was someone who hated HYDRA as much as she did.

Not that it was likely to save her life.

Kidnapped by a madman with a knife had not been among the scenarios she'd prepared for when she went undercover. What would Skye do? She would figure it out. For Donnie, for science, for the slim chance that this HYDRA-hating knife-man would let her go if she pulled this off.

She made sure he saw it in her eyes when she looked up at him again.


	2. Damage Control

"What the hell happened out there?"

Skye gave herself a breath, then another. She should have taken the shot-- the second shot-- sooner. She should have taken the shot.

"Simmons and Donnie Gill were taken by an unknown assailant. He had ICER tech and used it to take out everyone on the deck to clear the way to Simmons and Gill."

"How did he get on board with no one seeing him?" Coulson eyed the blueprint of the cargo ship as if it were to blame for the mission going sideways.

"He came from this direction," Skye replied, gesturing aft. "He must have concealed himself there at some point earlier."

"And how exactly did he get away when we had a sniper positioned above?" This was Hunter. Skye was trying to trust Hartley's judgment-- and Coulson's-- but it was hard to be in the same room as that guy without wanting to punch him.

She focused on her breathing, and on the facts. "I was waiting to see what his target was. I made a bad call, and he moved faster than I anticipated. I took the shot as soon as he grabbed Simmons, but it was too late. I thought I hit him, but he may have been wearing some sort of armor."

"Or," Trip said, "he may be Gifted."

Coulson grimaced. "Let's hope that's not the case. Then what happened? He dove into the water?"

"He surfaced out of range on the shore. He had Simmons and Gill. May and Hunter were still trapped belowdecks, so I went down to get them out before the HYDRA guys woke up. And I retrieved the guy's tech."

"Ours? Or HYDRA’s?"

"Uh... yes. It's a model that was developed before the split, so it's anyone's guess."

"Mack's running down inventory," Hunter put in, "seeing if anyone nicked it from us."

Coulson nodded slowly, considering. "Can you go see if they've got anything yet? Thanks. Skye, please tell me you got a good look at this guy."

"I did." She'd spent the past two hours trying to pin down every detail in her memory.

"As soon as you've got a description, give it to Hunter. He can reach out to his contacts on the seedier side of the city."

"You got it."

When she stopped in the corridor to catch her breath, she realized her hands were shaking. Damn it. She was supposed to be better than this.

She heard footsteps behind her and turned.

"Hey." Trip didn't try to approach, but just his presence helped her feel like the world wasn't shaking.

"I'm okay."

"I know you are. Listen, whoever this guy is, he doesn't have a clue who he's messing with."

"Do you mean us?" she asked, managing half a grin. "Or Simmons?"

Trip smiled his easy smile. "Both."

 

_The longer you keep something in your memory, the more distorted it becomes. Observation gets mixed with interpretation, and becomes subjective._

Alone on the Bus, Skye focused on the digital 3D model of the unknown assailant, trying to get the details out of her head while they were still fresh, as close to fact as she could make them. Dark clothes, but civilian wear, not any kind of tactical gear. That suggested a loner, not an operative representing some other agency or government. No, too soon for analysis. Focus on the facts. A scruffy beard along the line of his jaw, locks of dark hair falling into his face, the way he moved, confidently stepping across the deck like a lion stalks its prey. Scary, her brain supplied, but she tucked that thought away. Emotions weren't helpful.

A rifle-- but it was strapped across his back, not in his hands, like he didn't plan on needing it...

"Who's that?"

Six months training with May yet people still managed to sneak up on her when she got in the zone like this; at least she had enough control not to appear startled. She turned to see Fitz hovering in the doorway of what had once been his lab.

She didn't know if Coulson had read him in on Simmons's mission yet. If he was even going to. She didn't hide the model-- that would look way guilty, but she could always deflect. "Sorry I didn't get, like, holotable permission or whatever."

He blinked, then his mouth quirked as-- she imagined-- his mind belatedly caught on the memory of an old joke. Hazing the new kid. For a fleeting moment, Skye longed for those lost days with a real, physical ache.

"It's fine," he said. "The one they've got down in the base is, uh, newer. You know."

"Yeah, but it's quieter up here."

He nodded, slowly, several times, like he really, really understood.

"So, who is he?" Fitz came closer. His look of curiosity shifted into something more complicated. "He kind of... looks like..."

His voice trailed off, but Skye saw what he must be seeing. She'd gotten his face wrong, the jawline just a little too square, hair a shade too dark. She hastily tapped at the controls and fiddled with the settings until the rendering matched her memory-- a stranger, not her worst nightmare walking free.

If Fitz had any thoughts about the change, he kept them to himself. "Is this fellow why everyone is running about? What did he do? Did something... something happen? To Donnie?"

That was a negative on the Telling Fitz, then. She hated this. Simmons undercover, on a need-to-know basis so Skye only Needed To Know as a last resort, and now Simmons was missing and maybe dead and Skye wasn't allowed to tell Fitz.

"They did it, yeah?" he pressed. "They, they brainwashed him."

"Yeah, they triggered it somehow. He was gonna freeze the whole ship, with May and Hunter inside. I thought we could handle it, but then, this guy showed up." She nudged at the holoform, turning it slightly to consider his build. She adjusted his height.

"HYDRA?"

"Third party, I think. HYDRA sure didn't invite him. He knocked them all out."

"With the... the thing Mack's looking at?"

"Right. Do you know it?" she asked cautiously. He seemed mostly okay just now, but that was how he was these days. He was with it right up until he wasn't anymore, a moment that was never fun for anyone present.

"Of course. It's a, it's... yeah. No! No. A new... a new one."

"A new one of what?"

Fitz turned away from her, his face twisted in frustration. "No, I mean. Just... I literally just..."

"It's okay--"

"It's not okay, Donnie is, and I can't even--" His breath was coming shakily now. He was freaking out, and she didn't know how to help. She felt her nails digging into her palms and forced herself to relax her fingers.

_You can't fix him, so focus on what you can do._

"He took Donnie," she said, eyes trained on her mystery man rather than giving Fitz an audience to his difficulties. "We need to identify him, trace the tech, figure out what he wants and where he went."

"Modification." Skye allowed herself a glance and Fitz was staring off into the middle distance of the lab as he spoke. "It's a modification of the Thunderstick. Neuro... no, fibro... no, dendrotoxin. The Thunderstick could knock you out for a minute or two. This new, this modification, more like an hour. Drop down, flip the switch, night-night. How many HYDRA guys did he get?"

"Six," she said, then amended, "seven." Technically.

Fitz tilted his head approvingly. "Maybe he's on our side."

_You wouldn't be saying that if you knew who else he took._ "Maybe. Let's find him, and ask him."

"Want me to pull up a, whatsit, you know, if you're finished with the, that..."

"Facial recognition search?"

"Yes. That."

She restrained herself from double-checking that he remembered how. "Sure. While you do that, I'm gonna start looking through other channels."

"Like what? Is there a database for sketchy... scruffy... gun men?" He cringed as he fumbled his words, but the attempt at humor startled a laugh out of Skye anyway.

"Not exactly. But something about this guy... I've seen something like this before, I just can't place it."

"Oh, yeah," Fitz said, crossing over to his old computer terminal and poking slowly and deliberately at the keys, "I get that all the time."


	3. Catch-up

Cold. Donnie was cold.

He hadn’t felt cold for the better part of a year, so that was weird. The feeling sank so deep into his bones that his entire body ached, except in his shoulder where he didn’t feel anything at all.

What was happening? HYDRA had found him. He’d heard gunshots. Maybe he was dying. Finally.

“...don’t know how stable he’ll be,” a woman’s voice was saying, and as he opened his eyes and the world came into focus he recognized her voice. Agent Simmons. She’d been there… she’d said the words…

“Oh, dear. Don’t get up!” She was right there, standing over him, and she was going to make him comply again—he tried to lash out with his ice but nothing happened, he just felt cold, and dizzy as he pushed himself away from her with the three limbs that would respond to his brain’s commands.

“Stop! Stop it!” She reached out, her hands covered in heavy gloves, but seemed reluctant to touch him, just like the scientists back at the Fridge had always been. Afraid of him, but that never stopped their experiments for long. “Donnie, you’ve been shot, you mustn’t try to move—oh, for goodness sake!”

This last seemed to be related to the weight that had just dropped onto his chest, pressing him back onto the ground. There was somebody else in the room, and Donnie was a poor excuse for an ex-SHIELD agent and a fugitive for not noticing them sooner.

“Listen to the HYDRA lady,” the man growled as he pinned Donnie to the floor. “She’s trying to save your life.”

Donnie gave up struggling, mostly because he barely had the energy left to move.

_Shot. Stranger. Simmons is HYDRA._ None of it made any sense.

“Who the hell are you?”

“The guy who pulled you out of the harbor. The reason you’re not strapped to a table in some HYDRA lab right now.”

“This… isn’t HYDRA?” Admittedly, it looked more like a shitty motel room than anything else. And the blood-slick plastic sheeting underneath him was a far cry from the kind of pristine lab he imagined Jemma Simmons, Agent of HYDRA would work in.

“No, but it is probably compromised.” To Agent Simmons, he asked “How long until it’s safe to move him?”

She stripped off her gloves and fixed the man with a defiant look. “If I were his doctor, I’d recommend at least a week’s bedrest before he goes on the run from any secret organizations. Speaking as a hostage you’ll likely kill as soon as I’m no longer needed, I’d like to be allowed to live another few hours so I can monitor his condition. Until dawn, shall we say? Then you can do as you please.”

The man’s face was hard to read; he looked pissed, but his expression hadn’t really changed since Donnie had first seen him.

He said, “You can have until dawn as long as we’re secure here. But when I say we move, we move.” He glanced at Donnie and turned up the intensity of his glare a little bit— _don’t move or I’ll snap your goddamn neck_ , Donnie imagined him saying—then eased off him and got to his feet. He stalked out of the main room into the bathroom and slammed the door behind him without another word to either of them.

Was he just going to leave them alone? Simmons wasn’t even tied up. There were weapons—he craned his neck and spotted a rifle and at least three knives—and the door was right there—

“Don’t bother, you can’t even walk right now.” She smiled wryly. “And I seem to have lost one of my shoes.” She lifted her foot for him to see, then regarded it thoughtfully herself. Her white sock was mottled with dirt and sported a tiny embroidery at the ankle. A rose, maybe.

How the hell was _Agent Simmons_ HYDRA?

“What’s going on? What happened on the ship? Who is that guy?”

“HYDRA ordered you to freeze the ship, but a sniper took you out from above. As for who he is, your guess is as good as mine, but he seems to want you alive. I had to add a stabilizing agent to your blood so we could get the bullet out safely, which is why you’re having trouble using your powers.”

“A stabilizing agent… you took away my powers?”

“It’s only temporary.” She frowned. “If that’s something you want, there might be a permanent fix out there, although you’ll need to find another biochemist to do the work. I don’t expect I’ll be leaving here alive.”

“You really think he’ll kill you?”

“He’s… decidedly not a fan of my employers.”

“HYDRA. You really work for HYDRA.”

“I do.”

“Did they—did they brainwash you, too? Make you comply? Or—”

But she was already shaking her head.

“Why, then?”

“I’m a scientist, Donnie. I go where the work is.”

After that speech she gave at the Academy, all that bull about bad seeds, and this was all it took for her to work for the bad guys? They gave her the best science projects?

“And Fitz? Is he HYDRA now, too?”

Her cool demeanor faltered at her partner’s name. “You’ve met Fitz. What do you think?”

“I think he would have followed you anywhere.”

The words had the desired effect—Simmons blinked and looked away quickly, no more fancy secret agent mask.

Donnie had thought Simmons and Fitz were heroes, the best and the brightest and everything he’d wanted to be, once, but now he was a brainwashed freak, Fitz was gone, and Simmons turned out to be just another power-hungry scientist, playing god with people’s lives.

She could go to hell, and so could that creepy guy and whatever his agenda was. Donnie hadn’t asked anyone to save his life.

His life had never been his in the first place.

Their captor-slash-rescuer-slash-whatever emerged from the bathroom a few minutes of uncomfortable silence later, looking much the same except he’d taken off his jacket and gloves. Underneath he sported a ratty t-shirt, one normal arm, and one made of pitted silver metal, maybe titanium or some sort of steel.

Well, that explained how he’d held Donnie down like it was nothing.

“Oh, my,” Agent Simmons said mildly.

Because yeah, Donnie had been on the run for months, but he hadn’t been living under a rock. He knew the Winter Soldier when he saw him.


	4. Target

Fitz’s facial recognition program pinged a match.

Almost simultaneously, Skye called out, “Yes!”

“You found him?”

She scrambled over from the corner she’d claimed as her workspace for the evening, nearly tripping on one of the crates that littered the floor of the lab. With the underground base as their center of operations, parts of the Bus had been relegated to storage. Fitz didn’t like to work here anymore, with or without Jemma, so he usually only came up here to get away from everything. But it was different, working here with Skye. Jemma liked her lab just _so_ ; Skye was everywhere at once until she got really into her zone and it was like she was on another planet. It was different, but it wasn’t lonely. It wasn’t bad, and even the Simmons in his head seemed to agree, sitting quietly at the desk that should have been hers.

Skye held up her tablet, facing away from him. “Reveal on three. One, two… three!”

“Three,” Fitz said, just a beat behind her. He turned his monitor to her, then looked at what she’d found.

Hers was a YouTube video, a clip from a news program running the headline ROMANOFF FILES CONFIRM IDENTITY OF “WINTER SOLDIER”, as aerial footage showed a dark-clad figure fighting a shield-bearing one on a thoroughly trashed city street. The camera zoomed in on the guy attacking Captain America, and then froze on his scruffy, scowling face.

It was the same face as on Fitz’s screen: the SHIELD file on James Buchanan Barnes, missing since 1943, presumed dead, but in fact experimented on and brainwashed by HYDRA, linked to a dozen assassinations over the past fifty years. The SHIELD file didn’t have the blurry news-camera image, but a clean black-and-white portrait of Barnes in his U.S. Army uniform.

“We tied,” Skye said with a grin, and held up her free hand for a high five.

Fitz half-heartedly complied, distracted by the results of their search. “This is the guy? Captain America’s… friend?”

“That’s him. There was something about the way he moved, I recognized it from last summer when that footage was on every major news network, nonstop. He’s the one who took Donnie.”

“But he took him from… from HYDRA. So that means he’s not still, still. You know.”

“Brainwashed,” Skye supplied. “Yeah. I guess. He’s been MIA since the Battle of the Triskelion and, like, Cap’s kind of got a reputation for refusing to talk to the media, so all we have is wild mass guessing as to what went down. Agent Romanoff said in her Senate hearings that Barnes was…” she scanned the file on Fitz’s screen and read from it, “‘no longer believed to be a threat to national security,’ but she’s also the world’s most notorious spy, so I take what she says with a great big grain of salt.”

“Yeah, but,” Fitz began, trying to get his ideas into anything like a cohesive sentence. He was having one of his better days, he was pretty sure, but that meant instead of running off track his thoughts were all clamoring to be heard first. Save Donnie, understand the threat, brainwashing, Ward, brainwashing, _Ward_ , and all the secrets, always with the secrets, what weren’t they telling him? “If… okay. HYDRA wanted Donnie. This guy, Barnes, he took Donnie. From HYDRA. Saved him. So that’s _good_ , right? We should be thanking him, right?”

Skye hesitated. And Fitz knew that look. He was sick of that look. Wasn’t he doing better? Wasn’t he helping? But no, Fitz can’t handle what’s going on, we have to protect him, he’s fragile, Mack was the only one not walking on eggshells but he was new, didn’t have any secrets to protect.

“What don’t I know?”

Skye glanced at the door. “If Coulson didn’t read you in…”

“Then it’s above my paygrade. Great. Fine. I’ll just… go… do something…”

“Fitz…”

“You people!” he exclaimed, out of patience. “You want an engineer but you don’t give me any, any—”

Skye waited, but he didn’t have the word. He had to slow down, his brain couldn’t keep up with his heart.

“I don’t know if I’ll ever be—like before. But I can’t, I _can’t_ help if I don’t have any, any pieces. To work with. You know what HYDRA did to Donnie? You know why we know that? Because of me. Because I—”

For a moment he was back in the basement, and then he was in the medpod with Ward on the other side, falling away, and he couldn’t breathe—

“I know,” Skye said, and she wrapped her fingers around his wrist, her hand soft and warm. “I saw the recording,” she continued. “And trust me, you didn’t do anything I haven’t thought about doing myself. It’s useful intel, and we have you to thank for it.”

He focused on the point of contact, focused on her voice. Be here, be now. “But you’re still not gonna tell me what’s going on.”

She didn’t let go of his wrist, but her eyes again flicked over to the door to the lab.

“She’s not Agent May,” Simmons observed, rising from her desk and coming over to inspect the indecision that flooded Skye’s expression. “She’s not the queen of secrets, no matter how much she might try. She used to steal government secrets and post them on the internet, for God’s sake. She hates keeping things from you—”

“He took Simmons,” Skye blurted out.


End file.
